What does WebAuthenticationDetailsSource?

Question

I'm trying to figure out someone else's spring security code. I want to find out what this line of code does, and in general, this particular class. It is described very briefly and incomprehensibly in the documentation.

authentication.setDetails(new WebAuthenticationDetailsSource().buildDetails(request));

Answer 1

As you can see in the source code the class itself is very simple.

It has a single responsibility to convert an instance of HttpServletRequest class into an instance of the WebAuthenticationDetails class. You can think of it as a simple converter.

HttpServletRequest object which represents the parsed raw HTTP data and is a standard Java class is the input. And the WebAuthenticationDetails is an internal Spring class.

Therefore, you can think of it as a bridge between servlet classes and Spring classes.

The HttpServletRequest is an ancient class. Goes all the way back to Java 6. (link). And the other one comes from Spring. (link)